It’s the End of the World, And I Feel Fine: 10 Questions with Andrew Zolli

Andrew Zolli, author of Resilience: Why Things Bounce Back, says we might not be able to change the future, but we can figure out how to survive it. Photo: PopTech/Kris Krug

Andrew Zolli is a funny kind of optimist. As a futurist, he thinks it may be too late to pull the world back from many of the most dire global crises, including climate change, financial meltdown, and the energy crunch. But in that unpleasant future he sees an opportunity to embrace what he calls “resilience thinking,” an approach that could enable the world not to avoid disaster but survive it. In his new book, Resilience: Why Things Bounce Back, the PopTech impresario describes a car hurtling toward a cliff, Thelma and Louise-style. In the car are two groups of problem solvers: Risk mitigators and risk adapters. The first, the risk mitigators, held the moral high ground when the cliff was still a long way off as they sought a way to turn the car around. But Zolli thinks we may be past the point of a global U-turn. He says the people who need the world’s attention now are those in the other group, the risk adapters, who are working on building a better parachute.

Wired Business: How did you first get turned on to the idea of resilience thinking?

Zolli: Several years ago we started to notice something really interesting, and that was organizations and institutions and innovators were increasingly working not to steer us away from the big systemic challenges and risks that we face but were really beginning in a concentrated way to think about how to withstand those risks and disruptions and challenges. Big organizations — the IBMs and Nikes of the world, foundations like the Rockefeller, the State Department — these big organizations and lots of smaller social entrepreneurs and organizations, they were all converging on the same conversation. When you see that across the spectrum under the surface you get the sense that, wow, the tectonic plates are moving here.

Wired Business: Why is resilience a concept that’s important to embrace now?

Zolli: We are in a world where we’re closer and closer to the cliff. Not just in climate change, but in global economic systems, global energy systems. We’re closer to different cliffs across the board, and the systems are tied to one another. If we go over one cliff, we may pull ourselves over other cliffs. Our current system of globalization, for all its wonders and benefits, is like a giant hairball: If you pull one string, it’s not clear what other strings you might be yanking along with it.

Wired Business: What’s changed in recent years that makes you think it may be too late to bring the world back from the edge?

Zolli: I’m in my 40s. I came to adulthood in the 1990s. I got out of school and came into the labor pool in the decade when the Soviet Union was collapsing. America was able to scale down its military and spend a giant peace dividend. Clintonian economics reigned. The global economy was about ideas, creativity, the end of history. It was going to be peaches and gravy as far as the eye could see. And in the middle of that you had the advent of the web, which sort of put a giant exclamation point on the whole thing. What was the decade we got right after that? A decade demarcated by global acts of terrorism followed by international wars that ended with a global financial crisis. It may come to be seen as the suckiest decade in a very long time. I think what’s happened is there is an appreciation that we live in an era of intrinsic volatility and disruption and surprise. Global systems have created vulnerabilities, fragilities and disruptions. We need a new way of thinking about systems that bolsters them and makes them better at handling those disruptions.

Wired Business: So how do you actually define resilience?

When we let systems over-optimize, we often create systems that are really in danger even when they look like they’re doing their best.

Zolli: It’s a difficult concept to talk about sometimes because there are no seven pillars of resilience. There are no seven pat things that you do to build a system of resilience. Resilience is always provisional and context specific. It’s always resilience to something. Resilience is always about resilience of a thing to a thing. There are as many ways to be resilient as there are ways for systems to be. Resilience is really a field in formation.

Wired Business: Okay, given the contingent quality of resilience, what does resilience thinking really mean?

Zolli: Resilience thinking exists along a spectrum. At one end of the spectrum are people who think about the resilience of systems. Economies, ecosystems, broad technological networks like the internet, industrial sectors. In that world there are a set of patterns of resilience, sort of a pattern language of resilience that’s emerging about the systems. People studying the systems are studying them through the lens of complex adaptive systems. At the other end of the spectrum are people who are thinking about the resilience of individuals, groups, teams, organizations and social networks. At that end of the spectrum, you have social scientists, neuroscientists, organizational theorists. What makes you resilient? What makes me resilient? We’re at a point in the field where often the systems people and the social people don’t talk to each other as often as they ought to. But one thing we see is there are patterns that repeat. There are themes and patterns and principles that we see reflected over and over again. We see a pattern language of resilience.

Wired Business: What’s a good example of a resilient pattern?

Zolli: One of those patterns is about diversity. Systems that become too reliant on a single mode of value creation, economies that become too reliant on a single form of value creation, ecosystems that rely too much on one species to perform a certain task, become brittle over time and can fall apart and break catastrophically. It’s the monoculture problem in systems. There’s a very strong push in our contemporary society to make systems efficient. And often one of the ways you make systems efficient is you find the one thing you do really well and you do that thing to its apotheosis, its umpteenth level. One of the important observations is peak efficiency and peak fragility often go together. When we let systems over-optimize, we often create systems that are really in danger even when they look like they’re doing their best.

Wired Business: That sounds familiar. Where have we seen this before?

Zolli: The financial services industry prior to the collapse is a good example. That engine of making money was so valuable it was like crack cocaine. Business was so good that everyone wanted to be in it. The performance of financial services companies was incredibly correlated because they were all diversified by buying pieces of each other in ways that looked like they were buying pieces of diversification. But it was diversification without a difference. It was a monoculture of value creation. Diversity is extraordinarily valuable for the resilience of systems. It’s also expensive. It means it won’t be as profitable as it possibly could be. One banker said: One day this game of musical chairs will come to an end, but it doesn’t mean we can afford not to play.

Wired Business: You recently held a PopTech conference in Iceland, where the economy was famously decimated in the financial meltdown. What does the example of Iceland say about resilience?

I expect some flack from people who are in those traditional sustainability sectors. They would prefer to keep the focus on the traditional “bad guys.”

Zolli: There are a few things that Iceland demonstrates. The Iceland story shows we don’t live in a world of one size fits all solutions to crises. Not everybody should follow the same tune out of a potential problem, out of a disruption when it occurs. It’s not so much that Iceland is the model but it’s another model. In that sense it proves the rule that you have to have a lot of diversity. Even nations, not just companies, are winning and working in different ways from each other. In the U.S. there was a lot of improvisation (in response to the financial crisis), but it was not a group improvisation. Iceland went through a process where they collectively voted. It gave everybody a stake in the process. Can you imagine what would have happened in the U.S. if you had a national referendum asking people if they wanted to bail out the banks? In Iceland, the vote put everybody in the same boat and enabled the country to be genuinely improvisational. One of the themes of resilience is about the power of the small and the local. If you want to talk to anybody in Iceland, you can talk to someone who knows someone who knows them. The country represents a small-is-beautiful, highly improvisational response to massive disruption. It isn’t a perfect story, it isn’t a fairy tale. It’s less about having an answer than about it being a laboratory for exploring the answers.

Wired Business: In your book you talk about the need for better regulation to make the financial sector more resilient. Does resilience thinking have a politics?

Zolli: It’s not a left-right politics., though it’s certainly true that rule systems help. Think about an important piece of regulation, the Glass-Steagall Act, that was passed in the wake of the Great Depression. What it introduced was a sense of modularity into the markets. You couldn’t have these institutions that now span every sector and don’t have any breaks between them. When things go wrong they become an agent of contagion. We are 30 or 40 years into a historic transition where we have deregulated institutions and global financial markets. We have really taken the bumpers off the rails with the premise that our contemporary management systems made those rules obsolete. Certainly rules help and rules are really important. We will need to some rules to make sure systems are structured in ways that amplify resilience as opposed to amplifying their ability to spread risk.

On the other hand, what you need is flexible rules. What we’re talking about is not regulation versus the absence of regulation. What you need is a rule system that kicks into gear when you near a threshold of risk. It was literally inconceivable to financial regulators that we would have a crisis at the core of our financial system, so we had no rules addressing the unwinding of banks. We need systems that govern not the day-to-day but can really effectively deal with things when they go wrong. Focus on resilience is inherently a smaller, less grandiose kind of approach. It’s focused on more provisional solutions. In that sense it’s a more conservative idea. It’s less “let’s create a grand vision for humanity” and is more focused on how we make sure that the future is survivable. I expect some flack from people who are in those traditional sustainability sectors. They would prefer to keep the focus on the traditional “bad guys.”

Wired Business: Is resilience thinking an optimistic or pessimistic way of thinking about the future?

Zolli: I think ultimately I remain profoundly optimistic. I think the book and the whole field of resilience is profoundly optimistic. Here’s why. We live in a moment in which humanity’s challenges are accelerating at a pace that is hard to comprehend. At the same time humanity’s capacities are increasing at a scale and a rate that are hard to comprehend. We’re really in a footrace between two exponential curves—the curve of our challenges and the curve of our capacities. We are pulling in people to these solutions. We are finding roles for everybody. Resilience is participatory. Resilience is collaborative. It’s really democratic and local. That’s really an optimistic place to be: We have extraordinary tools and everybody can play apart. I think we’d be foolish to bet against humanity.